Certificate in Teaching Assistant Skills

Description

The Certificate in Teaching Assistant Skills is a voluntary, self-directed program designed to recognize and encourage pedagogical training, as well as to improve the confidence and skills of teaching assistants. The certificate is something you can list on a CV and/or include in your teaching dossier, and is registered with the Co-Curricular Record.

Participants seek out EDC-credited training sessions that are most meaningful to them, both for their current TA assignments and for their long-term development goals. The program requires that you reflect on your training and also that you use it to inform the production of a short contribution to the scholarship of teaching and learning. Complete details about all program requirements are provided on the cuLearn page, but in brief, each participant must complete the following elements:

Registration

Once you are inside the cuLearn page, you will have access to all information about the program, including

Due dates, instructions, descriptions, and samples for each program element;

The submission forms, through which all program elements are submitted; and

FAQs about the program and each of its elements.

The new cuLearn platform will allow you to

Check your own progress in the program at any time;

Seek clarification on any program requirements, via the FAQs, the “Your Questions” forum, and/or by emailing the program coordinator directly;

Receive important updates about any program updates or opportunities, or reminders about due dates.

If you registered in the program prior to May 2015, please check your Carleton email inbox for a message on this subject and/or consult this news post.

FAQs

The cuLearn page provides an exhaustive list of FAQs for each program element and for the program more generally, but a few are provided here for those who have questions they want answered prior to enrolling.

You are free to take as much time as you require to complete the Certificate in Teaching Assistant Skills. It is recommended that participants take 2 years whenever possible. Note that some program elements (Response Papers, TA Articles) have due dates early in the term (February/March) – all such dates and deadlines are provided on the cuLearn page.

Participants are strongly encouraged to work on the program’s requirements over the academic year to ensure there is less stress in February/March. In the past, some participants have failed to obtain the certificate because there are fewer training opportunities at the end of the year.

Yes. You can still participate in training that will help you earn your certificate. Some EDC-credited sessions are advertised through Grad Navigate, while still others are available either through your departmental mentor or the EDC directly. To register for such sessions, please email the session presenter. When you attend the session, make sure to sign the attendance sheet, providing your student ID. Your completion of such sessions will be tracked manually.

Please note that any training you complete while you are without a TA assignment, however, will not count towards the completion of your 5 hours of paid training and will not show up on your TA Training Transcript. For the 5 hours of paid training, you must complete the training in the semester(s) in which you have a TA assignment.

There are a number of ways you can find out if the session you have signed up for will help you earn credit towards completing your certificate. If you’re interested in one of the EDC’s many training options, the descriptions provided detail which ones are available for credit. If you sign up for a session via Carleton Central, you will see a line in the session description that says either “EDC credit: Yes” or “EDC credit: No.” We review workshops on a weekly basis as they are posted on Carleton Central and assign credit wherever warranted; if a session isn’t yet assigned EDC credit, its status may well change once we get a chance to review it–please be patient, as this process is manual. If your departmental mentor is running a session, you can ask him/her directly. The general guideline to keep in mind is that the EDC certificate is meant to track and acknowledge the development of transferable teaching skills in Carleton’s TAs, so most sessions that focus on developing specific, portable teaching skills that you could apply in any post-secondary teaching environment will earn credit towards the certificate.

You can view your progress towards completing the 10 EDC credits in Carleton Central, although it is strongly recommended that you keep track of your own progress independently. Remember to count your progress by EDC Credits earned and not hours. Overall program progress, meanwhile, is tracked via the cuLearn page and can be checked anytime.

Orientations, information sessions, professional development sessions (resume writing or job preparation sessions), and duplicate sessions (i.e., you took the same topic a year or term earlier) are ineligible towards your progress in the certificate.

Both peer mentoring and the reviewers in peer feedback training options are tracked in the same manner as a traditional in-person session.

For Peer Feedback:

Reviewers can count their experience towards their certificate progress. One peer feedback is the equivalent of one training session.

Reviewees,however, are fulfilling a requirement for their assignment of duties and are not actually completing any training. They may, however, submit a response paper elaborating on the feedback received from the peer reviewer which will counted towards their response paper requirement.